The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, is holding the Twelfth Gulf Studies Forum during the first week of December 2025.
The Gulf Studies Forum is an annual conference organized by the ACRPS Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Unit, bringing together researchers, academics, and experts from the Gulf region, the Arab world, and beyond to discuss the region’s domestic, regional, and international affairs.
The 12th Gulf Studies Forum will cover two main themes. The first, “Arab Gulf States and Transformations in the Arab Mashreq”, raises key issues related to the recent, profound transformations in the Arab Mashreq as they relate to the Gulf states, analysing their impact on these states’ positions, roles, priorities, networks of regional and international relations, and their trajectories. These transformations include Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, that war’s impact on Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, and the fall of the Syrian regime. The forum departs from the following central question: How are the Arab Gulf states interacting with the structural transformations taking place in the Arab Mashreq, and to what extent have they influenced and been influenced by them?
The second theme “Social Media in the Gulf: The Construction of the Political and Civil Sphere” addresses research issues related to the uses of social media in the Gulf context, and how its functions are determined accordingly. The importance of studying social media in the Gulf is heightened by the fact that Gulf countries are among the top users of social media in the world. As such, these media contribute to building the political and civic sphere, and constitute a key space for building identities and bonds. The forum will focus on studying various phenomena related to social media in the Gulf, including the roles of actors/influencers, the rise of digital programmes and podcasts, Gulf governments’s interactions with social media and its legal regulation, and the dialectic of freedom vs. censorship, among others.
* The Forum Concept Note.
